Sick Over Health Care Reform

Photo by Greg Maslowski

Imagine yourselves nine years old nursing an ear infection you just can’t shake.

Health insurance is some vague notion that adults discuss and who cares, all you want is the pain to go away.  Your family has no health insurance, so the emergency room serves as your primary physician.  (Per a study recently released by the Centers for Disease Control “…8.2 percent of children still lack health care coverage…”)

Emergency care may guarantee a provision of services, but offers no guarantee the treating physician will be the same professional with each subsequent visit.  Certainly the chart history is available, but the valuable relationship forged over periodic contact between a patient and a primary-care doctor is simply not established.

Imagine yourselves the parents of the nine year old.  Although prescribed an antibiotic the last time round, her temperature spiked while at school, so back to the ER you go.  Your daughter seizures during the examination.  It’s one of those moments where life whirlwinds, yet slows at an excruciatingly numbing pace.

Air-lifted stat to a children’s hospital, a slice of her skull was removed during surgery to relieve pressure from the brain.  The nagging ear infection had developed into a brain abscess. Your daughter celebrated Thanksgiving in a medically-induced coma.

Fools and young children are often watched over by a higher being and while here on Earth,  by skilled medical professionals.  Your child wakes to recover and will spend a miraculous Christmas at home.  A second surgery lies ahead to reunion the skull of your lucky, lucky girl, who–on the ironic upside– now has an established relationship with a medical team.

This is a true story.

If a prior relationship had been in place, would the infection been discovered earlier, sparing this young lady and her family all they endured?  My guess is most probably.

While the back and forth over the Senate health care bill denigrates into a battle of ideology, I think of this child and others like her when asking what I thought would never prove a question.

Will progressives turn a deaf ear on health care reform in our time?

***

One out of five Americans lost their health care this past year.

58.4 million lacked coverage at some point in the year prior to the survey, while 31.9 million — or nearly 11 percent — did not have insurance for more than a year.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

12/2009

Other Posts by Sheree Shatsky:

Senator Johnny M

How Transparent

Tough Work

Obstruction vs. Instruction

Time Capsuled